Professional careers jeopardized by old charges

A local office of the Wisconsin State Public Defender recently assisted two former clients who encountered obstacles with their respective legal and medical careers (minor details have been changed to ensure client confidentiality).  These examples show that old criminal cases, even for relatively minor charges, can cause employment difficulties and frustrate professional advancement many years later.

The first former client recently passed an out-of-state bar examination, and he disclosed on his license application a 20-year-old Wisconsin misdemeanor charge.  When he called for assistance in interpreting the online court records, he learned (to his relief) that what he had always thought was a criminal conviction had actually been reduced to a non-criminal ordinance violation.  Although the original criminal charge remains accessible in Wisconsin’s court records, he was able to amend his license application to report that he does not have any criminal conviction record.  (It is not clear what effect a misdemeanor conviction would have had on his licensure, but now he won’t have to find out.) Read more

Collateral consequences of conviction in Greece

Collateral Consequences of Conviction in Greece[1]

by Dimitra Blitsa

1. Access to Greek Criminal Records 

In Greece, a criminal record is created for every adult[2] person who has been irrevocably convicted of a misdemeanor or a felony (i.e. by a decision not subject to an appeal before the Supreme Court). Unlike in the U.S. but consistent with continental European countries, a Greek criminal record does not contain arrest information. Individual criminal history records are considered “sensitive personal data.” Disclosure and access is restricted to protect the convicted person’s privacy and to promote rehabilitation. Although Greek court proceedings are open to the public, court records are not available for public inspection.

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Copyright dispute roils federally-funded database of collateral consequences

Copyright-symbol-with-a-lockShould a compilation of collateral consequences mandated by federal law and prepared with federal funds be freely available to states and members of the public?  The Uniform Law Commission says yes, the American Bar Association says no.

In an article posted on May 18, the Wall Street Journal pulled back the curtain on an on-going dispute between the ULC and the ABA over copyright restrictions the ABA has imposed on data in the National Inventory of Collateral Consequences (NICCC).  The ULC is concerned that restrictions on access and use of the NICCC data are likely to stymie adoption of the Uniform Collateral Consequences of Conviction Act (UCCCA), which requires that states create their own inventories.  The ABA contends that the existence of other potentially conflicting databases would create undesirable confusion about the meaning of the law.  An excerpt from the WSJ piece (a companion to another article on collateral consequences published the same day), follows: Read more

50-state survey of relief from sex offender registration

We have prepared a new 50-state chart detailing the provisions for termination of the obligation to register as a sex offender in each state and under federal law.  This project was inspired by Wayne Logan’s recent article in the Wisconsin Law Review titled “Database Infamia: Exit from the Sex Offender Registries,” discussed on this site on April 15.  The original idea of the project was simply to present Professor Logan’s research in the same format as the other 50-state charts that are part of the NACDL Restoration of Rights Resource, supplementing it as necessary.  But getting all of the state laws condensed into a few categories turned out to be a considerably more complex task than we imagined, in part because we had to fill in a lot of gaps, and in part because of the extraordinary variety and complexity of the laws themselves.

We present it here as a work in progress in the hope that practitioners and researchers in each state will review our work and give us comments to help us make the chart most helpful to them and to affected individuals. Read more

Georgia high court extends Padilla to parole eligibility

The Supreme Court of Georgia has extended the doctrine of Padilla v. Kentucky to a failure to advise about parole eligibility.  In Alexander v. State, decided on May 11, a defendant sentenced to a 15-year prison term for child molestation sought to set aside his guilty plea on grounds that his defense counsel had not warned him that, as a recidivist, he would not be eligible for parole.  The Georgia high court agreed that this failure constituted deficient performance under the doctrine of Strickland v. Washington, overruling its 1999 precedent holding that the Sixth Amendment did not require a defense lawyer to advise a client about this “collateral consequence” of conviction. The Georgia court distinguished its 2010 post-Padilla decision declining to find a warning by the court necessary, finding a clear constitutional distinction between defense counsel’s Sixth Amendment obligation to advise a client considering a guilty plea and the court’s due process obligation to warn a defendant in the same situation.

At the same time, the court declined to approve a lower court’s earlier extension of Padilla to sex offender registration, reserving for another day the question whether this consequence is “a drastic measure” that is “intimately related” to the criminal case.  Most of the post-Padilla decisions involving parole eligibility have rested on the dubious pre-Padilla erroneous advice exception to the collateral consequences rule, an exception that the Alexander court firmly rejected.